Iraq

Horror at the bridge

The latest tragedy might, just might, bring Iraqis together

EVEN by Iraq's recent dreadful standards, the stampede on Baghdad's Bridge of the Imams on August 31st was an exceptional disaster, leaving more people dead in a single incident than at any time since the Americans invaded two-and-a-half years ago. At least 700 people, many of them women and children, were crushed to death or pushed into the Tigris river where hundreds of them drowned. The toll, say some, could rise to a thousand.

The victims were almost all Shias who, in an annual procession, were commemorating the death of a holy man, Imam al-Kadhem, who died in 799AD and is buried in a mosque near the bridge. The vast gathering was restless after some mortar rounds, presumably fired by Sunni insurgents, had landed by the saint's shrine. A rumour then spread that a suicide-bomber was about to blow himself up in the crowd. It would not have been the first such attack. A suicide-bomber killed scores at the imam's shrine in March last year.

It is mercifully surprising, given the rising sectarian tension, that such tragedies rarely trigger immediate retaliation. Senior Shia clergymen, such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, invariably call for calm. But this horror comes at a particularly bad moment, just as Iraqis limber up for a referendum next month on a controversial constitution which to some extent pits Shias against Sunnis. It may strengthen the hand of those Shias who argue for a separate federal region in the south, safe from Sunni insurgents. It may also bolster the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Shia party whose militia has been taking the law into its own hands against suspected Sunni insurgents. Initial reports suggest that security at the bridge was in the hands of the Mahdi Army, loyal to a radical Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr.

Yet such tragedies sometimes provide a chance for sectarian reconciliation. This time, even some Sunni organisations sympathetic to the insurgents have rushed to express their condolences to the Shias. And the Americans, who often get blamed by Sunnis and Shias alike for Iraq's misfortunes, seem so far to have escaped retributive wrath.